The two brothers behind Scrabulous, the unofficial online version of Scrabble that has become a hit among among Facebook users, launched a new online word game last night - Wordscraper.

Developers Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla launched Wordscraper worldwide less than 48 hours after being forced to take their original creation, Scrabulous, offline in the US and Canada in response to a lawsuit from Hasbro.

The brothers voluntarily closed Scrabulous to North American users on Tuesday following a claim of intellectual property infringement by games manufacturer Hasbro, which owns the online rights in the US and Canada.

They have now launched Wordscraper, with significant changes to make the game less like Scrabble.

Hasbro owns the online rights to Scrabble in the US and Canada, while Real Networks owns the rights in the rest of the world.

Scrabulous is still available to users outside the US and Canada, although it reportedly suffered some downtime last night.

Wordscraper is available to Facebook users worldwide - but it has just 200 users so far.

Electronic Arts' Hasbro-licenced official version of Scrabble for Facebook has seen a burst of new users in the past week, increasing from 9,000 to more than 51,000.

The Hasbro-licensed game was slow to build a userbase when it launched and has also struggled with bugs and appeared to have been brought down by a hacker yesterday.

Facebook said in a statement that it did not want to discourage developers from trying new ideas on the site.

"Games are an important part of the social experience on Facebook," said the firm.

"We're disappointed that Hasbro has sought to draw us into their dispute. Nevertheless, we have forwarded their concerns to Scrabulous and requested their appropriate response."

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